by Karen Perry
I’m not sure how long we talk. Even afterwards, I cannot account for how much time we spend in that room. Whispered confidences in a strange place with a young woman I don’t even know. Giving voice to things I had never openly admitted to, not even within the privacy of my own thoughts. The atmosphere in this cramped space crackles with the static of fear, of time running out. The two of us wait to be gathered up.
‘I expect they’re dead by now,’ I say.
‘The terrorists?’
‘At Stoney Street, the police were there almost immediately. It was all over in less than twenty minutes.’
‘I guess.’
She fingers the rim of her empty Coca-Cola can, stares down at it and says, ‘I envy them.’
‘Who? The terrorists?’
A slight tilt of her eyebrows, and she looks up. I notice how her chin juts forward just a tiny bit. It lends her an air of determination, or stubbornness.
‘Not that they’re dead, I mean. But I admire their conviction.’
‘You do?’ I cannot keep the incredulity from my voice.
Her gaze is calm, clear-eyed. In a quiet voice, she almost mumbles, ‘I’d like to believe that much in something.’
There is something rueful and downbeat about her, but for the first time since entering this room, I feel wary of her. I think of all I have told her and feel the first shimmer of doubt.
When her phone skitters over the table, awakening like an angry wasp, we both jump.
She snatches it up, thumbs the screen, hesitates, then says, ‘We can leave.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes. But go carefully.’
We’ve been sequestered in this room for what feels like hours, and now, leaving it, I feel some residue of the place has seeped into my bones. I go first, down into the darkness, and it feels like a game I once played as a child in my cousins’ house: I was blindfolded, with all the lights turned out, everyone else hiding, as I stumbled from room to room, somehow afraid that I might never find anyone, that I would be trapped there alone, for ever.
I can feel her close behind me, and as I find the bottom step and move towards the door, fear clutching at my throat, instinctively my hand reaches out behind me until it finds hers. A hand that is cool and dry, papery skin over narrow bones. Our grip on each other tightens. Now is the moment. I reach for the latch, open the door, and slowly lead us out.
The street is cast in a greyish-orange light punctuated by a flash of blue. On the ground there are bodies writhing; medics in yellow jackets lean over them, bent on their ministrations. Splatters of blood and shattered glass litter the tarmac. Uniformed police swarm the area, herding zombie-like survivors away from the carnage. Ambulances and police cars stand guard on both sides, a police-cordon tape flickering in the breeze along the perimeter. Someone starts shouting at us the moment we emerge. But what stands out above all else are the white sheets on the ground that cover the slain. The street is littered with them. My insides turn to liquid, bile comes up the back of my throat, and just then the girl squeezes my hand. I had forgotten she was there. Her nails dig into me, reaffirming our connection. It is only now as the police officer reaches us that I realize I do not know her name.
‘Quickly,’ the officer says, taking hold of my arm.
I don’t look back, as I’m ushered away. But I do look down. And as we hurry away from that place, that glimpse of hell, my gaze is caught by a pair of feet emerging from beneath one of those sheets. Orange trainers. Lights that once danced in the soles, now extinguished.
2.
Amy
In the dim cave of the bedroom, I take a last toke before crushing the reefer into the scallop shell. I don’t normally smoke weed, but under the circumstances I feel like I need it.
I’ve been online for almost three hours – nothing unusual in that. But tonight is different. It’s not the usual grim slog through Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat. I haven’t been wading through cyberspace, dipping into fan sites and online chatrooms, a swamp of useless information, the inane and virulent comments left by trolls, feeling the hot welt of anger growing inside me. There’s a purpose to it now – something to look for.
Someone.
A quest of sorts. A treasure hunt. I’m looking for her face.
Pale skin, light freckles visible beneath her make-up, across her nose and cheeks. Shoulder-length auburn hair, parted to one side, salon-sleek with a hint of a curl. Eyes a marbled green that reflected her reserve, her intelligence, pupils retracting into pinpricks while the rest of her eye widened with fear.
Downstairs, the subwoofer gives out its blood-thunder bass beat. It’s three o’clock in the morning but the party goes on. There’ll be sore heads and scant attention in the lecture halls tomorrow but that’s not my problem. I don’t even know these people.
Brief stirrings in the bed behind me, as I click and click again, homing in on my quarry.
‘Amy?’ Sean says, his voice groggy with sleep and irritation. ‘When are you going to turn that thing off?’
‘In a minute,’ I tell him, not even turning back to look.
Nothing showy or obvious in her beauty. A shy flower. Maddening how I cannot find her image, each search drawing a blank.
I’m dimly aware of my face reflected back at me from the window behind the desk, and beyond that the neat row of windows in the houses opposite, curtains drawn, everything locked up safe. All of it familiar to me. The street outside. Sean stirring in the bed. My night-trawls through cyberspace.
She reached for me in the darkness. Her hand held in mine.
Something has come over me. I look down at the keyboard beneath my fingertips, remember the pulse running through her blood communicating with mine, exposing my sudden need.
A change is coming.
The one I’ve been waiting for.
I can feel it.
3.
Cara
It is six hours since it happened. Six hours since I hid in that room. Beyond the windows of our apartment, a grainy light filters through the night sky. I can feel Jeff’s hand in mine, the reassuring pressure of his thumb passing over the ridges of knuckles and bones.
A cup of tea sits cooling on the table in front of me. A cold skin has formed on the surface, the sight of which makes my stomach retract in tight revulsion. He has stopped urging me to drink it. I look down at his hand in mine, and note the whiteness of my skin, the unfamiliarity of it. For a disconcerting moment, I have the feeling that the hand is not mine, but a part of someone else. A foreign object. Everything in the room is impacting strangely upon me.
‘What did the police say?’ he asks gently. ‘Will they want to speak with you again?’
‘I don’t know. I gave them my contact details.’
‘But you did tell them what happened? You did tell them what you saw?’
‘Yes. But there were so many people. So many accounts.’
All at once I am back there on the street, the strobe of blue lights cutting through the night air, white sheets on the ground concealing the lumpen shapes of bodies. A female officer’s hand gripping my upper arm with a firmness that only served to remind me of the flimsiness of my own flesh, my mortality.
‘You’re alright,’ she kept saying to me, her voice steady and reassuring, but I felt the urgency in her grip, the desire to get away from the site of all that killing.
I was ushered to an Italian café I knew well – a boisterous place, full of gentle mockery, each customer addressed in terms of intimacy. It was part of the strangeness of the night that this café now seemed to cower beneath a weight of hushed silence. Shaken survivors were herded inside to sit quietly at tables, some whispering into mobile phones, others holding their heads in their hands or staring blankly into the middle distance. The gregarious Italian waiters, sombre now, administered hot drinks while uniformed police hunkered down at tables, taking statements. It was only as I wordlessly accepted the hot coffee put in front of me that I realized she wasn’
t with me – the girl from the storeroom. I got to my feet and looked about, craning for a glimpse of that yellow-white hair, those trailing earbuds, but to no avail. She was gone, and I could not explain to myself the disappointment it made me feel.
‘Cara?’
My thoughts snap back to the present. Jeff is staring at me, concern etched into his face. I look at him in the dawning light, still in his dressing gown, worry and lack of sleep making him look his age. It is only recently that his hair has thinned, whitish-grey hairs threading through a dark-brown thatch. The lines that run from the sides of his nose to the corners of his mouth have deepened into dark grooves. He is fifteen years older than me – a disparity that has never bothered me. When we got married five years ago, I believed that the difference in our ages was the only gap that could ever exist between us, and that it would blur in time. I believed that we were meant to be together.
‘You still look shaken,’ he remarks. ‘I wish there was something I could do or say to help.’ For just a moment, the way that he is holding my hand, the deep concern in his eyes, makes me think that this is the thing that will bring us close again. The knowledge that we could, so easily, have been violently torn apart. We love each other. We have made a life together. Surely that is all that matters?
‘I think you should have a brandy,’ he tells me, letting go of my hand and leaving his chair, heading towards the kitchen cabinet we call the drinks press. The thought of alcohol repulses me right now. I’ve already had a skinful, the dregs of it still spinning down the drain of my thoughts, making me feel heavy-limbed and overused, so I stop him and tell him no.
‘You’ve had a shock,’ he insists.
‘Look outside,’ I tell him, pointing towards our kitchen window. Beyond the glass panes, the sky shows signs of sunrise, dirty yellow clouds like nicotine stains.
‘Mabel will be awake soon. I can’t start the day with a drink, now, can I?’
He has his hand on the corner of the press, a frown puckering his forehead. His concern has morphed into something else. He no longer looks anxious. It’s something closer to unhappiness.
‘Have you called Kamila?’ he asks, shaking me from my thoughts.
‘Kamila?’
‘Didn’t you say you left her at the Tube station?’
A little trill of nerves pulses in my stomach.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, have you checked if she got home?’
‘I –’
‘Or let her know that you’re okay? She must be worried.’
‘I lost my phone, remember? How could I?’ Despite my best intentions, these words come out sounding scratchy and irritable.
I have already explained to him how I dropped my bag on the street, offering it up as the reason why I didn’t call him to let him know. Why his first inkling that something had happened was when I arrived through the front door, grey-faced and shaken, pushing past him to Mabel’s room. I needed to feast my eyes on my sleeping child to reassure myself that even though my world had tilted in the night, the important things remained constant, true, safe.
‘Besides, I saw her going down into the Tube station. She would have been well away by the time it happened.’ I don’t look at him as I say this.
‘You should still call her,’ he urges softly.
He is right, and I know it. My husband, who I have known and loved for six years now – the man I felt relieved and grateful to marry, knowing how safe and protected he made me feel, a harbour in a storm – is someone I trust and depend on, whatever the circumstances. But now, I feel a scream rising up inside me at his sound advice, his sensible approach. Hold me! I want to shout at him. Can’t you, just for once, forget about doing the right and sensible thing, and just hold me!
‘Do you want to borrow my phone?’ he asks.
‘That’s okay,’ I say calmly. ‘I’ll call her from the bedroom.’
And as I start up the stairs, I can hear him refilling the kettle, slotting bread into the toaster, flicking on the radio, and it occurs to me that an opportunity has been lost. That I might have sat him down and told him the truth – the real, deep truth about the night, about what happened. But I’m tired. Too tired for words. And part of me knows that the time for truths to be spoken has long since passed.
The weekend is a blur of tiredness, relief and obligation. I end up spending a good deal of time on the phone – not just to Kamila, but to other friends, who have heard the news and are calling to express support and horror. With each call, I find it gets a little easier. The repeated phrases act as a defence of sorts, keeping me at a distance from what I actually experienced.
By the time I call Victor, the presenter of the radio show I work on, the story has moulded itself into an identifiable pattern in my mind, its nuances hardening into historical facts. Victor Segal: shock-jock or voice of the people, depending on your opinion. He has been in the radio business for almost thirty years and for the last six, he’s had me as his series producer. I know him better than either of his ex-wives and possibly better than his shrink. As I talk him through those moments of descending the staircase and stepping out into the street, my eyewitness account of the aftermath of carnage, it almost feels like a third-hand account of something that happened to someone else.
‘Listen to me,’ he intones gravely, ‘who else have you spoken to about this?’
I start listing the various friends but he cuts me off.
‘I mean at the station? Is there anyone you’ve spoken to about this, other than me?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Do me a favour, will you, Cara? Just keep it to yourself for now, eh?’
‘Okay. But why?’
I hear the cigar wheeze of his indrawn breath, and when he speaks again, his tone is softer, almost avuncular.
‘You’ve had a bad night, love, but you were lucky. Put down the phone – better still, turn it off. The telly and radio too. It’s a beautiful day. Why not get out there with your husband and child. Smell the roses, eh?’
Grousing, snappish Vic, my ageing enfant terrible. It’s so strange to hear him speak to me like this. My guard falls momentarily, and for the first time since this whole thing ended, since leaving that room, I feel myself coming close to tears.
When I see Vic on Tuesday morning, it finally dawns on me why he urged me to keep my story to myself.
There’s a sleepy feeling about the place, as if the city is reluctant to drag itself out of the long weekend. I’m crossing the office floor towards my desk, my mind roaming over impending tasks: a pre-recorded interview with a children’s author will have to be bumped in order to make way for coverage of the terrorist attack and its aftermath; a decision will also have to be made about some of the other lighter segments we’d hoped to air; they might be deemed poor taste in light of Friday night’s atrocity. These are the thoughts running pitter-patter through my mind when a sharp rap on the glass wall of the meeting room makes me look up. Victor and Derek, one of our producers, are inside, along with Katie, my assistant. Derek is beckoning me to join them.
It’s still early – barely even dawn – and apart from Katie, I’m surprised the others are in already. There’s a sheepish look on Victor’s face, an eagerness on Derek’s, and as I open the door it strikes me with force what it is they want from me.
I pause at the door and hold Vic’s eye, then say, ‘Forget it. I’m not doing it.’
‘You have to, Cara. You were there! You saw it!’
I take my seat opposite him, the others looking on silently. Katie pushes a polystyrene cup of coffee towards me. It’s my second one this morning but I feel like I need it.
‘No way. It’s crossing a boundary. I’m the series producer. I’m not meant to be heard on air.’
‘What is it you always say when something big happens? Get me an eyewitness who can speak coherently and let’s put them on air.’ The exaggerated lilt of the bog Irish accent he affects sounds nothing like me. Apart from the soft ‘r’s and the
occasional ‘grand’, all traces of my Irish accent were rubbed out long ago.
‘It doesn’t feel right –’
‘Oh, come on!’ he cries, exasperated, then gives me some guff about professional obligation and journalistic integrity.
‘Vic’s right,’ Derek chimes in, capping and uncapping his pen – a tic of his that I’ve seen hundreds of times, but this morning it gets on my nerves. A hipster in his early thirties, with leather brogues and rolled-up chinos, Derek is looking at me with grave intensity above his pointy beard that makes me think, for some reason, of the last tsar of the doomed house of Romanov. ‘When Vic rang me yesterday and told me what had happened to you, I was horrified. But I have to admit I had the same thought as Vic. This is exactly the kind of story our listeners are hungry for. It’s too good to pass up.’
‘Come on, love,’ Vic wheedles. ‘It’ll be fifteen minutes, that’s all.’
My eyes are scratchy with sleeplessness. I feel hung-over yet I haven’t had a drop since that last Aperol spritz in the Water Poet on Friday night.
Beyond the glass walls of the meeting room, the office is filling up. I can see the cluster of desks I manage – the researchers and producers, the broadcasting coordinators, all in their places. By 10 a.m. this place will be humming with a melange of different people, from the young interns barely out of school to the seasoned old-timers coasting towards their pensions. A girl – one of the Marketing staff – passes the window. There are white iPhone buds in her ears, the slender cables disappearing into the collar of her shirt, and the sight of this touches something within me – a raw spot. That girl in the room. Jesus, all those things I told her. The memory of it brings a vertiginous swing. In my shoes, I feel my toes clench.
